Mozilla Lays Off Connected Devices Team

Don't expect Firefox to come to an IoT device near you any time soon.

The Firefox browser won't be coming to a connected TV near you any time soon, thanks to the Mozilla Foundation's decision to lay off the employees of its connected device division.

The non-profit browser maker, which has weathered intense competition from Google and Microsoft in recent years, once saw mobile devices and the gadgets that make up the Internet of Things (IoT) as fertile ground for expansion beyond the desktop browser market, even introducing a dedicated Firefox OS for connected TVs (pictured above).

Mozilla is now eliminating most of the team responsible for that exploration, CNET reported on Thursday. Around 50 of the foundation's 1,000 employees will leave, including Senior Vice President for Connected Devices Ari Jaaski. The layoffs mean that Mozilla won't soon launch any new commercial software for consumer IoT devices, although the company said that it intends to continue its IoT research.

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"We have shifted our internal approach to the internet-of-things opportunity to step back from a focus on launching and scaling commercial products to one focused on research and advanced development, dissolving our connected devices initiative and incorporating our internet-of-things explorations into an increased focus on emerging technologies," Mozilla said in a statement to CNET.

One of those technologies is Project Quantum, a next-generation Web engine designed to harness the multiple processor cores that are increasingly showing up in smartphones and other mobile devices.

The layoffs come one year after the foundation abandoned a similar effort to bring Firefox to smartphones. Somewhat ironically, that pivot that was intended to pave the way for the connected device offerings that Mozilla is now abandoning.